Both the left and center-left are acting like the other faction within the party is the enemy—and not Donald Trump. Democrats need to keep their eye on the ball: Trump and the corruption, lying, and incompetence across his administration. In the past couple of days, the massive dishonesty has included Doug Burgum’s doubling down on the Reflecting Pool lies and Todd Blanche’s sham document on the IRS and the J6 weaponization fund. And why is Schumer signing off on a deal with Republicans to keep the government open? Plus: Max Miller is finally a national story, and Tim unloads on getting dragged into the Michigan Senate race as well as AIPAC’s massive spending on behalf of Haley Stevens.
As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.
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HALEY STEVENS’S AND ABDUL EL-SAYED’S campaigns are wildly different in ways that are pitting Democratic voters’ heads against their hearts.
And with polls showing El-Sayed leading by double digits, I wonder if the heart is pulling away. Focus groups help shed light on the way voters reconcile their personal preferences with strategic calculations, in a way that polling can’t.
We conducted three focus groups—one each in April, June, and July—with Michiganders who had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and planned to vote in the Democratic primary for the Senate race. We wanted to get a deeper sense of how they were feeling about tomorrow’s election.1
One of our participants, Amanda, summed up a tension she’s feeling between idealism and pragmatism:
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(1) I have an idea for how to fix our post-Trump political system.
(2) There’s an opening in the Reflecting Pool case to send someone from the Trump administration to jail.
This is as close to Optimistic JVL as you’re ever going to get. Let’s dive in.
By the end of this week America will forget about the case of David Hearn, the man Donald Trump blamed for the failure of his Reflecting Pool.
Quick catchup for anyone who has already forgotten:
Trump is obsessed with the physical beauty of Washington, D.C., and so is trying to turn the downtown area into a presidential palace compound.
Part of this project involved his revulsion that the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial resembled an actual patch of water and not a hyper-idealized artist’s rendering.
So Trump gave a no-bid contract to “fix” the Reflecting Pool to a vendor no one knew anything about.
Within days of the project’s completion, the Reflecting Pool failed in a spectacular and embarrassing manner.
Trump needed to blame the failure on someone; he claimed that the project had been physically attacked and vandalized (despite having previously promised it would be vandalism-proof). He set his Justice Department on the case of finding someone to prosecute for this imagined crime.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia (and former TV lawyer) Jeanine Pirro looked around and decided to charge David Hearn with a felony—thus bringing the full weight and power of the American government against a blameless citizen purely to satisfy the narcissism of the president.
I want to underline this: Hearn faced up to ten years in prison for these charges.
On Friday Pirro’s office withdrew its case against Hearn, claiming that its own charges were baseless—that the Reflecting Pool failed because of the contractor, not because of vandalism, and that a different branch of the Trump administration had hidden these facts from the prosecution.
I encourage you to read the motion for dismissal. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that either someone from the Department of the Interior should go to jail, or someone from the Department of Justice should be disbarred. (Or both?) We’re going to talk about why that is and who it might be in a moment.
“The defendant, Hearn, ripped a piece of recently installed sealant on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. The evidence shows, and we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that Hearn willfully destroyed property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.”
“Our evidence further shows that the National Park Service employees observed Hearn actually forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands.”
After Pirro’s prepared remarks she took questions from reporters. She insisted that, “There was an effort, a violent effort, to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool.”
When a reporter pressed her, pointing out the trove of video evidence existing that showed the Reflecting Pool failing prior to Hearn’s arrival on the scene, Pirro mocked the reporter:
Reporter: Did he have any tools or was it just his bare hands?
Pirro: Right now, we believe it’s his bare hands, both hands.
Reporter: So does that indicate in your belief that it was probably damaged before or do you believe that he—
Pirro: Oh, he damaged it.
Reporter: —further, but do you believe it had already been damaged before—
Pirro: He damaged the pool.
Reporter: —before he touched it.
Pirro: He damaged this pool.
Reporter: But there had been, you know, all these videos.
Pirro: Well, good. I’m glad you’ve got that evidence. Come on in the grand jury, you can testify.
By the Justice Department’s own admission, we can now say—definitively—that these were falsehoods. Pirro lied. She lied about a private citizen in the course of a criminal prosecution against him.
It’s outrageous. But it also tells us how we can fix almost everything in American politics going forward:
Will Sommer, Sam Stein and Andrew Egger went live to cover the growing calls on the right for GOP Rep. Max Miller to resign, whether Jeanine Pirro will be fired over the botched Reflecting Pool case, Tucker speaking with foreign agents, and the audience collapse among right-wing MAGA media figures.
How much of an eyesore will Donald Trump’s coveted Triumphal Arch be? A National Park Service assessment found that the planned 250-foot arch will intrude on the views from “dozens of historic sites around the capital,” per new reporting from the Washington Post. But look on the bright side: Think of all the flexibility you’ll have finding a good seat to watch them knock it down later. Happy Monday.
Start your week off right: Come irradiate your brain with MAGA Mondays! Will Sommer and Andrew Egger are live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Of Lemons and Lemonade
by William Kristol
I’ve never had much interest in Dale Carnegie, the relentlessly upbeat and optimistic American self-help guru. I’ve ignored advice during my time in Washington that I could benefit from studying his 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve resisted the counsel of some friends, concerned for my well-being in the age of Trump, to take a look at his 1948 treatise, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
I’m too old to change my ways. No Dale Carnegie for me.
But perhaps some Democratic politicians could benefit from a dose of Dale? They are, after all, in the business of trying to win friends and influence people.
They might take a glance at the famous passage from How to Stop Worrying on lemons and lemonade. Carnegie warns against the attitude of the person who, finding life has handed him a lemon, gives up and says: “I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance.” Then, Carnegie writes, “He proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of self pity.”
By contrast, Carnegie explains—using a phrase he helped popularize—when a wise man is handed a lemon, he asks, “How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?”
Late last night, the American people were handed a lemon: A capitulation by Republican senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina that makes confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general likely. Blanche provided them a fig leaf, a written order formally rescinding the proposed $1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of political prosecutions and a statement allegedly limiting the provision of the agreement that shields Trump, his sons, and their businesses from tax claims.
These assurances will presumably be enough for Blanche to make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday on a straight party-line vote. He’s then likely—though not certain—to get the 50 votes he’ll need to be confirmed by the whole Senate, probably at the end of the week.
So this lemon will be added to a whole bushel of other lemons in Trump’s cabinet. Todd Blanche will join Jay Clayton, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Markwayne Mullin as confirmed leaders of the key national security agencies of Trump’s executive branch. Having loyal and determined apparatchiks like them in positions of real power for the next two and a half years is not a good thing.
On the other hand: There is lemonade to be made here. Trump’s polls have been sinking. Republicans are almost certain to lose the House this fall, and the Senate majority is up for grabs. Democratic control of both houses would help check Trump’s authoritarian schemes. And the fact that the entire Senate Republican conference will have to cast a high-visibility vote to confirm Todd Blanche can help in turning the Senate Democratic.
Assuming Mitch McConnell remains absent, Republicans can only afford two defections in the Senate. They may lose Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. So incumbent GOP senators in tossup or somewhat contested races, like Jon Husted in Ohio, Dan Sullivan in Alaska, Ashley Moody in Florida, Roger Marshall in Kansas, and Pete Ricketts in Nebraska will have to vote to confirm Blanche. And Republican candidates in open seats like Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, and Montana will presumably have to express support for Blanche.
It’s possible there will be a revolt among a few GOP senators against this man who sought to shovel taxpayer money to the January 6th assailants, who has initiated and presided over blatantly political prosecutions, and who was at the very center of the Jeffrey Epstein coverup. On this last front, Epstein survivor Dani Bensky put it bluntly last week: “You can’t say that you want to make sure that sex offenders and sex traffickers are behind bars and then vote for him. Every vote for Blanche is really a vote against survivors.”
If there is a revolt and Blanche loses, it will be an embarrassment for Trump. But if Blanche is confirmed, it could do more damage to Republicans. It will be visible proof, if proof were still needed, that if Republicans are left in control of the Senate, there will be no check on Trump’s coverups and corruption and lawlessness.
So Democrats need to make this next week as visible and painful as possible for the GOP. They should drag out matters on the Senate floor to keep the issue of Blanche front and center as long as possible, and then hammer his confirmation during the recess as a key example of the truth that a Republican Senate will never stand up to Trump.
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I see only one obstacle to this exercise in lemonade-making. Needless to say, it’s been created by the Democrats themselves. Yesterday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Appropriations Committee vice chair Patty Murray announced their support for a continuing resolution to fund the government through December 11. They envision cooperating with Republicans to bring it to the floor and pass it this week.
Leave aside that, in my judgment, it’s a bad agreement on substance—with no restrictions on Trump’s war, on lawlessness at the Justice Department, or on the behavior of ICE agents.
But it’s also politically foolish. Funding for the government doesn’t run out for two more months. There’s plenty of time to deal with this question in September. Why allow Republican senators to go home for recess taking credit for a bipartisan budget deal? Why give them what they will tout as an example of successful bipartisan governance under Republican leadership?
This shouldn’t be complicated: First, Democratic senators should kill the deal on the continuing resolution. Then they need to use the Blanche confirmation to highlight the truth that a Republican Senate will simply be a rubber stamp for Trump over the next two years. Todd Blanche may well get confirmed. But if they don’t get in their own way, Democrats can turn that sour lemon into sweet, tart lemonade.
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Those of us who spend a lot of time observing right-wingers have been predicting an outbreak of internecine conflict. And lo, behold an outbreak of intra-Nicene conflict.
Certain sectors of the right are this close to dusting off images of mitre-headed bishop crocodiles ambling ashore to turn America into a Catholic theocracy. This isn’t a reaction to the first American pope; it’s a fight about the ideological makeup of right-wing elites and, as is often the case, Vice President JD Vance’s place among them. (It’s not even the only proxy fight about Vance among right-wing intellectuals right now.)
Vance has a long-running game of footsie with post-liberalism and the theocratic Catholicism of “integralist” intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule, who may not have a large electoral coalition but have openly strategized about installing conservative Catholic elites in the government and administrative state. The aim is something like a government of, by, and for Catholic converts, and Vance is their blue-eyed boy.
As with so many right-wing dustups, this one involves an anonymous X account, “CappyAmerica,” which declared itself “Never Vance. Never the Post-liberal Papal Integralist Socialist thin-skinned jerk Vance.” (The account has about 1,300 followers.) The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles detected a “neo-Know-Nothing contempt for Catholics” in the anti-Vance tweet, comparing it to coded antisemitism. (This is news to me, a parishioner at my local church, as it would be to Cardinal Christophe Pierre, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, who issued a correction to key post-liberals by name.) Knowles in turn was mocked by non-integralist Catholic conservatives, who are able to easily distinguish their politics from aspiring theocrats. Thomas D. Howes, coauthor of Why Post-Liberalism Failed, commented: “Lol, no.” The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre, a self-described “great respecter of the [anti-Catholic] Know-Nothing tradition” also rejected the comparison to antisemitism. Anti-Catholic authoritarians generally seem to see the post-liberals and integralists as rivals in their preferred authoritarian future.
Erick Erickson, who describes himself as a “Christian broadcaster” and “Conservative truth-teller,” didn’t really even seem to know what was going on, bless him.
But Knowles did have some allies. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and the activist Christopher Rufo, in a parallel social media spat, both weighed in to defend a sanitized version of the post-liberal position, which turned into a days-long debate over the meaning of “the Common Good.” Post-liberals and their defenders maintain that fostering the Common Good ought to be the authentic end of politics; critics recognize it’s an ideological Trojan horse for post-liberals’ coercive project.
These are mere skirmishes in a larger war dividing the religious right: the role of Holy Mother Church. While Catholicism may be struggling in the provinces, conversion and Mass attendance are political and social markers among young conservatives in Washington. In a report last week on the Heritage Foundation, New York Times contributing writer Elisabeth Zerofsky highlighted complaints about Heritage head honcho Kevin Roberts’s efforts to enforce strict Catholic social teachings at the think tank and, by extension, the conservative movement. Is this the direction of American conservatism? And, by God, is it electorally viable?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter so long as Catholics make up the vanguard of right-wing politics. As Nate Weisberg points out in New Yorkmagazine, Catholics constitute “more than a third of the members of Trump’s second-term Cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.” Not to mention non-cabinet figures, including “press secretary Karoline Leavitt and border czar Tom Homan.” That’s not to say these figures buy into—or are even aware of—post-liberal integralist dreams, though some in Vance’s and Rubio’s orbit do, and there are at least some young White House staffers who consciously think of themselves in this way.
Part of the zest here, as the original tweeter makes clear, is about positioning for 2028. The Heritage Foundation, Zerofsky reports, “is investing heavily in its relationship” with Vance, the foremost political figurehead of hard-right weirdness who has made his adult conversion to Catholicism a key part of his story. There is a long tradition of conservatives crossing the Tiber, but the way Vance has engaged with authoritarianish social conservatives, both here and abroad, suggests a genuine affinity for post-liberal politics.
In the immediate fight, it’s pretty clear that conservatives who want Rubio (or someone else entirely) to lead the party post-Trump have fallen one way, while those lining up behind Vance have fallen the other.
As for us, we’re Never Vance too—though for strictly non-sectarian reasons.
A Blistering Critique of the Roberts Court, From Hawaii’s Supreme Court… In an extraordinary opinion, the state justices accuse the SCOTUS majority of undermining democracy, writes KIM WEHLE.
Happy Declaration-Signing Day… Nobody signed America’s birth certificate on July 4, 1776, explains DAVID HEAD: John Hancock didn’t put down his John Hancock until August 2.
Quick Hits
TRUTH API GOES LIVE: One act of outrageous corruption ends; another arrives. Donald Trump may have formally renounced his plans for the “anti-weaponization fund” for taxpayer-funded payouts to J6ers and other allies, but he’s thought up another way to rob the public instead. This time, however, the money is flowing straight into his own pocket.
Over the weekend, Trump Media, the president’s company that runs Truth Social, launched its new Truth API feature, which promises faster access to Trump’s social media posts to companies that fork over a reported $100,000 a month. The company is explicitly billing this as a way for financial firms to get an edge in trading over their competitors by being the first to see the president’s “most market-moving Truths.”
From top to bottom, the whole concept is so corrupt you almost struggle to get your head around it. Donald Trump, in his official role as president, chooses to communicate about his official acts not through official channels but on a private platform he himself owns. Now, he is using that platform to sell premium access to knowledge about the workings of the U.S. government. This is pure rent-seeking; there’s no value-creating service here, just Trump finding a way to charge for something—knowledge of the working of the government—that should already belong freely to Americans by right.
And it’s true: Trump’s posts do send markets careening around, and traders do run the risk of being left in the dust if they’re slower than their competitors to react to Trump’s posts. As a result, many companies will doubtless be willing to pony up. They may even be eager to, seeing this as one more protection-racket payment—like donating to Trump’s super PACs or ballroom fund—to help them stay personally on the president’s good side.
This money isn’t coming out of the U.S. Treasury. But it’s not coming out of the pockets of hedge funders either. Trump is just skimming off the top of the entire financial system—which is to say, the U.S. economy at large. “Truth API” is public robbery no less than if Trump had created a new tax for Americans to pay him personally.
DOJ ADMITS OBVIOUS ON REFLECTING POOL: Hey, remember when Donald Trump resurfaced the Reflecting Pool, the new surface started falling apart instantly, and the government started thuggishly arresting people it pretended had “vandalized” the pool to try to save itself from embarrassment? They were always obviously lying, but now, per the Hill, their story is falling apart faster than a new American Flag Blue pool liner:
The Department of Justice (DOJ) moved Friday to drop its criminal prosecution of a former Olympian charged with destroying the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, saying the damage was instead the result of a “rushed and botched installation.”
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office blamed the contractor for overspraying and delamination.
In a new court filing, the office indicated it no longer stands behind its case against David Hearn, a three-time Olympic canoeist who pleaded not guilty to felony destruction of property earlier this month.
Remarkably, the Justice Department’s filing blames the Interior Department for initially covering up the fact that the pool had already begun to peel. “Given all of this newly discovered information,” prosecutors wrote, “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Hilariously and insanely, the parts of the government that aren’t currently speaking on penalty of perjury in court are still trying to keep up the vandalism story. After the DOJ threw Interior under the bus, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to X to insist they were mistaken: “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. . . . We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.” You want to testify to that effect, Doug?
OHIOANS PUSH BACK ON ICE: As the Trump administration begins to ramp up immigration enforcement in Ohio, hundreds of Ohioans turned out this weekend to protest ICE activities in the Buckeye state. In Akron, roughly 200 protesters posted up Sunday outside of Akron-Canton Airport to protest ICE flights from the airport.
In Cincinnati, outside of the Blue Ash ICE facility, nearly 550 people, including a number of clergy, came out to protest. Carl Ruby, who has been frequently cited in these pages, was there, accompanying a member of his congregation who was called in by ICE for an appointment. Ruby prayed outside the entrance where his congregant entered. “I want the ICE agents to look out and see me praying,” Ruby told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
An attendee / reader tells The Bulwark that the protest was well organized, with protesters careful not to give law enforcement a pretext to crack down: “We could only stand on the grass. We couldn’t even touch the cement because we didn’t want the police to shut us down.” They weren’t shut down, and they hope to be there next weekend too.
Ruby got his wish. The attendee reports: “All these ICE people kept coming to the door and looking out and peering out the windows.”
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)
WAR TENDS TO BE BAD FOR BUSINESS. Investment dries up and talented workers flee. So it has proved in the Persian Gulf, where the war with Iran has driven out foreigners, snarled supply chains, and destroyed local infrastructure. This might seem an odd time, then, for the United States to start exporting millions of expensive and sophisticated AI computing chips to the United Arab Emirates. Data centers in the UAE were, after all, some of the first targets of Iranian drones.
The Trump administration apparently sees things differently. Last month, it removed all restrictions on the sale of advanced AI chips—along with a host of other sensitive technology and military equipment—to the Emirati government and its national AI champion, G42. For years, the UAE has been begging Washington to let it buy more chips. The country is eager to turn itself into a global provider of AI services; it wants to be the AI version of an oil state, able to use its control of computing power for economic and political leverage.
The Trump administration seems determined to make that happen. This most recent favor to the UAE is just the latest in a sequence of self-defeating decisions. To recap: In May 2025, Trump announced deals with the Gulf states to boost their AI ambitions, approving the construction of some of the largest AI data centers in the world in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. These deals were always risky: The Gulf states have close ties to China and a track record of technology leakage and masssurveillance. And the administration never had a good plan for how to protect these enormous data centers filled with fragile electronics from drone strikes. But it at least promised that exports would be conditioned on “robust” security measures.
As it turned out, the administration couldn’t deliver on its pledges. It struggled to implement the deals, failing to process chip export licenses on time. Negotiations stalled over security requirements and investment commitments. Chip companies and Gulf governments alike grew frustrated.
Then came the war. In February, Trump’s military campaign against Iran put the entire business model behind the Gulf AI deals in jeopardy. It’s hard to build and operate cloud infrastructure in a war zone. Foreign workers left, regional ports were disrupted, and insurance costs soared. Iran, looking for economic targets, bombed Amazon’s data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, and threatened additional strikes on OpenAI’s Stargate UAE, the centerpiece of the administration’s Gulf ambitions. Months after the outbreak of the fighting, Amazon’s Middle East servers are still offline.
BY THIS POINT, ANOTHER ADMINISTRATION might have rethought the strategy of offshoring America’s AI infrastructure to the Gulf. The Trump administration doubled down. On July 10, it removed all restrictions on the sale of advanced chips and other sensitive technology to the Emirati government, lifting controls that had been in place since before the recent AI boom. State-backed Emirati companies can now buy millions of AI chips, build massive data centers at home and abroad, and host leading AI models within their territory—all without the security restrictions the Trump administration once touted. If powerful models sit on Emirati soil, the U.S. government will lose influence over how they are used, and it will be far harder for U.S. companies and security agencies to prevent the model weights—the model’s core intellectual property—from being stolen.
The giveaway goes beyond AI. The end of restrictions on the sale of other military technology may allow the UAE to buy American arms more easily than Saudi Arabia and, in some cases, even Israel—a likely unsustainable situation. Washington may well find itself forced into further concessions to keep the region onside.
What the United States got in return is hard to see. The Trump administration’s announcement identified no new security commitments from the UAE, no new restrictions on technology transfers, and no concessions on the UAE’s relationship with China. Key figures in President Trump’s circle, however, appear to have benefited handsomely from the UAE. Shortly before the United States initially approved the sale of more chips to the Gulf, for example, the UAE’s national security advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan purchased a 49 percent stake worth half a billion dollars in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture founded by relatives of Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
It’s hard to know what exactly is driving the Trump team’s decision-making, but opening the taps on one of America’s most advanced technologies makes neither strategic nor economic sense. There are many more reliable allied countries where U.S. companies can build major data centers. And giving away the store on AI is a high price to pay to keep the UAE onside during a war the United States had no pressing need to start in the first place. For all its claims to put America first, the Trump administration has given the Emiratis the deal of the century.
In the space of a year, the Trump administration has managed to make promises it couldn’t keep, start a war that destroyed the economic case for the original bargain, and then give away all of its leverage to compensate for the damage. For a president who talks endlessly about deal-making, giving away one of the crown jewels of American technology and getting nothing in return is a remarkable achievement.
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
THE HAWAII SUPREME COURT issued a stunning opinion last month that said explicitly something that many other judges across the country have been thinking: Donald Trump is not the only snake in the garden. The justices in the majority on the United States Supreme Court are a danger to democracy too.
Anyone worried about the future of American democracy should take some time to read the opinion.
The case, Granillo v. State of Hawaii, involved a Maui man’s motion for a new trial following his 1990 conviction on charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. He was sentenced to forty years in prison. On appeal, the Hawaii Supreme Court found that “the prosecution used hair and fiber evidence” that “science has since proven . . . false,” so “his right to a fair trial was violated.” The decision to grant him a new trial was unanimous.
The argument I want to call your attention to is buried deep in the 91-page majority opinion—starting on page 72, where Associate Justice Todd Eddins turns his sights on the nation’s highest court.
U.S. Supreme Court precedent holds that the government’s unknowing use of false evidence doesn’t violate a defendant’s constitutional rights. That precedent would seem to apply in the case of the wrongly accused Maui man. But should it apply? Justice Eddins writes that the relevance of U.S. Supreme Court cases “ultimately depends on the premise that the federal constitutional doctrine controls this court’s interpretation of [the Hawaii Constitution]. It does not.”
Had Eddins stopped there, his opinion would have amounted to an unremarkable affirmation of a basic principle of federalism—of the idea that the due process clause in the state’s constitution can be more expansive than “the United States Supreme Court’s construction of the federal Due Process Clause.” But what comes next is nothing short of astonishing: a damning indictment of the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority.
Eddins begins by quietly invoking the history of racial discrimination in this country: “The Court that now defines federal due process does not honor the work of 1954,” he wrote. “It revives the work of 1857. The work of 1896.”
In case your memory of what you learned in high school history is rusty, let me remind you about each of those years. In 1857, the Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott ruling, holding that no black American descended from slaves could ever be a U.S. citizen. In 1896, the Court constitutionalized racial discrimination in Plessy v. Ferguson, an opinion affirming the use of whites-only railroad cars. And in 1954, the Court overturned Plessy with Brown v. Board of Education, banning the “separate-but-equal” construction of the Fourteenth Amendment that tolerated racial segregation in education.
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Eddins notes that Dred Scott relied on notions of originalism—that “the Constitution must be interpreted ‘according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted’”—and charges that “today’s hubristic originalists use the same method to control modern life.” “The Court overrides what Congress passed,” he wrote. “It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.”
“We take no guidance on the meaning of due process from a court that gutted due process protections in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org.,”Eddins writes, which “erased a ‘generations-long constitutional right, stripping autonomy from half of the population, and empowering states to force birth.’” (He is here quoting a decision he wrote in another case last year.)
And now, he writes, “the same jurisprudence has cratered democracy itself.”
“The Roberts Court did what Congress never would. It rewrote the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a cornerstone of American civil rights, democratically enacted and repeatedly reauthorized.” This “judicial demolition” began in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Court “invent[ed] a textually unsupported equal-sovereignty fiction and str[uck] down preclearance on a hunch that the law worked too well.” In 2021, the Court “fabricated ‘guideposts’ nowhere in Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] to greenlight racial discrimination in voting.” And this past June, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court “buried what remained of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. Pretend law for a real statute.”
And the right-wing majority didn’t stop there, Eddins writes. “The Court then ditched its own thirty-two day default for releasing decisions and hustled out its judgment mid-primary, a favor granted over objection only twice in twenty-five years.” “Weeks later, on its shadow docket, the Court tossed an eleven-day trial record built on fifty-one witnesses, 790 exhibits, 2,600 pages of testimony, and a 270-page opinion by a three-judge court.” In throwing out that case, which involved a Voting Rights Act challenge to Alabama’s congressional districts, the Court “resurrected a tainted congressional map the three-judge factfinders found deliberately entrenched racial bias against Black voters.”1
Eddins then ticks through a series of other cases in which the Roberts Court has remade the face of American politics by rewriting the law itself: Citizens United, in which the Court in 2010 “claimed fidelity to text, history, and tradition while invalidating yet another democratically vetted law, handing corporations the same speech rights as flesh-and-blood Americans and letting dollars talk louder than voters”; Rucho v. Common Cause, in which it “abandoned partisan gerrymandering to the gerrymanderers, refusing for the first time to remedy a constitutional violation because it believed the task beyond judicial competence”; Trump v. United States, in which “it placed a president above the law”; and this year’s NRSC v. FEC, which “made Citizens United look quaint, shredding coordinated spending limits . . . and ensuring that those who bankroll elections drown out the ordinary person. Billionaires spend tobe repaid. Everyone else just votes. The Roberts Court hasmade sure one’s wealth counts more than another’s vote.”
“Rulings run in one direction, time after time,” Eddins concludes. “Weakening protections for those with less power. Fortifying those with more. The pattern speaks for itself. A court that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity” is one “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.”
THE CASE BEFORE the Hawaii Supreme Court did not warrant such an impassioned condemnation of the U.S. Supreme Court. But Eddins and his colleagues wanted to send a message to the country. While the world frets over Trump’s incompetence, corruption, and carnage, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court enjoy a deference that obscures their role in causing permanent damage. Presidents come and go. The Constitution is enduring, amended only through supermajorities in both Houses of Congress and state legislatures. Or by radical ideologues in robes.
In another passage worth noting, Eddins critiques the Roberts Court’s use of the language of “colorblindness.” As a judicial concept it can be traced back at least to Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy (“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens”). Harlan used the language of colorblindness to dispute the majority’s pretense that racial segregation favoring whites is tolerable under an amendment designed to remedy hundreds of years of enslaving people on the basis of race.
Now, though, colorblindness has become the distorted rationale that the Roberts Court has used to kill consideration of race in college applications and, just this past term, what remained of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Any consideration of race, the justices have declared, is unconstitutionally discriminatory—even if it’s designed to remedy systemic racial discrimination.
Eddins puts it this way:
The Roberts Court sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect. The freed people, their descendants, and all others denied equal citizenship. It turns its back on what is in plain sight. The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was. The Court calls the Constitution colorblind while engineering the dilution of Black votes, the unraveling of hard-fought civil rights remedies, and the erasure of Black history. That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design.
A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind. It is whatever the Court needs it to be. A way to advance its partisan project.
Eric begins with major show news before pivoting to the jackassery of the week with Eliot. They then analyze Trump’s interactions with Bibi Netanyahu and Vladimir Zelensky at Lindsey Graham’s funeral and discuss the ways in which the Iranian and Ukrainian wars are increasingly intertwined. The two discuss Iran’s ongoing unwillingness to “take yes for an answer” as evidenced by their recent strikes across the region. Historian and Professor Robert Parkinson then joins the show to discuss his recent book Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. Parkinson explains his focus on the twenty-seven colonial grievances listed in the Declaration, the crown’s misjudgments in attempting to address colonial discontent, and Thomas Jefferson’s additional two grievances that were edited out--among other topics.
Greg Jaffe & Kate Kelly in the New York Times on Adm. Daryl Caudle:
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock, X.com)
WHEN DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES and ad makers began mapping out their midterm campaign strategies last year, they went looking for a villain beyond Donald Trump—a bogeyman who could motivate voters.
Elon Musk played the role for a while. Then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took center stage in the midterm messaging. Other operatives have floated making JD Vance or Trump family members the bête noire.
But as the midterms near, it turns out it’s not a person who Democrats are villainizing, but a place.Or, rather, the concept of them.
Data centers are the Democratic party’s en vogue bad guy, increasingly demonized bycandidates running in competitive races, along with the corporations racing to build them around the country.
A sampling:
Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown released two ads last month alonegoing after data centers for raising utility bills and attacking his Republican opponent, Sen. Jon Husted, for seeking to bring data centers to the state.
In the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, Paige Cognetti, who is hoping to unseat first-term Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, released a campaign ad slamming data center developers.
James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, held a news conference two weeks ago calling for tighter regulations on data centers.
And in Florida, David Jolly, the former Republican member of Congress running for governor as a Democrat, made waves when he called for a moratorium on the construction of data centers.
These are just a few examples of what has become a major talking point for Democratic candidates across much of the country.
“Voters were already looking for a fight over high utility bills, and then data centers walked in the door and gave voters a target to take out that anger on,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster. (McCrary’s clients include Tennessee state legislator Justin Pearson, another candidate who has made data centers a focal point of a congressional campaign.)
There are several reasons Democratic campaign officials believe data centers are a potent political issue. First,
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Andrew Egger and Will Sommer give their takes on the stunning new developments surrounding GOP Rep. Max Miller. After facing mounting abuse allegations, Miller launched a livestream to defend himself and released a Dropbox full of what he claimed was exculpatory evidence. Instead, his response appears to have intensified scrutiny. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller's former father-in-law, publicly condemned the congressman, saying he should no longer serve in office. Andrew and Will examine Miller's unusual defense and why Republicans are just now beginning to distance themselves.
ICYMI: JVL and Jasmine just dropped the latest edition of The Triad Mailbag. We hope you'll take a minute to watch this free preview so you can find out why Bulwark+ members like C. Hanson say:
The Triad Mailbag is an excellent addition to The Bulwark. Always informative and interesting. It struck me while watching today’s segment that it gives a deeper insight to JVL’s values and thought process. I always appreciate his informed take on the issues and these Mailbag spots help uncover the how and why behind it. Please keep it going!
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Hey, y’all! JVL and I are back with another installment of the Triad Mailbag. As always, thank you for your excellent queries!
In this episode we cover:
From Dave Y.: DSA candidates have gotten a lot of publicity lately. What is your take on them? (starting around 0:28)
From Judy B.:What can be done to protect the 2030 census? (starting around 8:09)
From JennyB:What do you think about Ross Douthat joining ‘60 minutes’?(starting around 9:21)
From Stephen R.: Do you agree with the theory that Republican voters want authoritarianism because they believe that left-wing authoritarianism is out to destroy them? (starting around 15:12)
From In The Age of Now:In the Secret Pod, you said “We’re going to lose, but you have to go down fighting.” This reminded me of Tolkien’s idea of “the long defeat” in the fight against evil. Does Tolkien’s idea resonate with you? (starting around 18:15)
From Kate B.:Why aren’t you a fan of Ezra Klein? (starting around 22:16)
From tupper:What problems was the website’s redesign trying to solve? (starting around 27:25)
From SJ:Could you take a minute and gush about another member of The Bulwark? (starting around 31:18)
From Alejandro M.:What World Cup jerseys have you been sporting? (starting around 34:10)
From E.J. Joseph:Have you considered writing another book? (starting around 35:20)
From Jessica E.:Do you play any instruments? Does anyone in your family? (starting around 35:58)
Also from Jessica E.:Who are your favorite musicians/bands? (starting around 36:54)
From MCM:What are your favorite comic book series? (starting around 37:15)
From Smike:What is something in arts/culture that you hate and everyone else seems to love, or you love it and everyone else seems to hate it? (starting around 39:20)
Triad Mailbags are posted in the member-only Bulwark Takes feed for our audiophiles and include a transcript, edited for clarity and concision, here.
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